Week 2 Loss - A Reflection

The first game of the season is never easy.. especially when you are playing the 2nd best team in the league. After seeing Punishment play yesterday, I am certain of 1 thing... that WASN'T their first game of the year.

Here is a summary of my observations and thoughts from the game.

Defense
Solid. I personally made 2 errors in the first inning, however I can't think of anything else that went bad. The outfield (half of which was substitutions) played great. There are few teams that will hit it harder than they did yesterday, and if our play in the outfield is any indicator of how the rest of the season will be, we won't have much to worry about.

The infield played decent as well. There were few balls actually hit on the ground that were playable. 2 errors by myself and a miscommunication after a grounder to first helped inflate their score. By the end of the game we were running smoothly.

Offense
If I had to describe our offense over the past couple of sessions in 3 words- it would be "the bare minimum". We always seemed to do just enough to get by. Yesterday we fell way short of doing just enough. The first few innings yielded no offensive production, but again, by the 4 and 5 we were starting to turn things around. Now that the pressure of remaining undefeated is off our shoulders, we can focus on improving this deficit. Expect big changes in the lineup for next week.

Overall
If you would have asked me mid-game yesterday, I my answer would have been different. By the end of the game I was feeling much better about how things were going. We were making some contact on the ball, putting runners on base and allow little if any runs every inning. It was almost the Cake Farts of last year. Almost. Going forward, hitting has to improve. We have to communicate better defensively and accept the good with the bad.

Our key to success this year lies in our ability to function as a team. We won't be worrying about invidual statistics, who can hit the ball the farthest or made the best play. At the end of the day the only numbers I report to the CRC are wins and losses. Lets focus on those.